


Professor Powell and the Patio Paving

by gutterandthestars



Category: Original Work
Genre: Amateur Sleuthing, Gen, Geology, Murder Mystery, Or Is It?, Snark, landslides
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-01
Updated: 2019-07-01
Packaged: 2020-06-02 03:07:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19432681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gutterandthestars/pseuds/gutterandthestars
Summary: Professor Samantha Call-Me-Sam Powell is mostly procrastinating when she agrees to help out one of her undergraduates by examining a potential landslide behind their rented student house. The student's acting more suspiciously than circumstances seem to warrant but neither student or professor are prepared for the truth or the consequences of their investigations.===Check out the notes at the end if you're of a squeamish disposition!





	Professor Powell and the Patio Paving

The knock at my office door is hesitant, but then they nearly always are. If God, as Saint Paul has it, did not give his followers a spirit of timidity then at their professor’s door all undergraduates are atheists.

So am I, of course, but it doesn’t take faith in a deity to be kind to students so I tell them to come in. And it is office hours in the Geology department.My door is metaphorically open.

The diffident door knocker is a pale little girl - young woman, sorry - in a floral, pastel cotton boho scarf, loose seventies style shirt and jeans. She’s tiny, even in wedges (God, the seventies really are back this year) and she seems genuinely concerned. You learn to tell, if you deal with undergraduates for any length of time. I see all sorts. There’s the “I didn’t bother trying with this essay, but can I have an extension anyway?” vibe, there’s the “no one taught me how to cope with life, so I just don’t know how to” vibe, the more serious but subtle signs of different mental health problems and the shaky confession of students who just don’t know how to deal with the pressure of having to juggle more than one task imperfectly (more common, these days, than I used to see). Then there’s the always awful “my world is shaken”: death of a parent, a sibling. Even a pet, for some of the more sensitive ones - I can be sympathetic to that. And sometimes something much nastier and even closer to home. There’s a reason I took up counselling training as I climbed the academic ladder. About the only things I’ve never heard confessed across this desk are bestiality and murder. I fervently hope it stays that way.

This little undergraduate is one of the second years. Two hundred students take geology modules at this university and I’m damned if I can remember all their names. I’ve seen this one’s face, noticed her scarves of which she seems to have a multitude, called on her when she’s raised her hand. But there are so many students. So I play the scatty academic: distracted, well-meaning. Not a huge stretch for me and, though I do feel guilty about it, it works. My feminist, bisexual (and, incongruously, Pentecostal) PhD student Sarah says I shouldn’t do this but she’s young and she didn’t have to cut her teeth in the 80s and 90s when softly manipulating my precious male colleagues was easier than demanding they meet me as an equal. Come to think of it, it still is. Possibly Sarah’s right and I’m part of the problem.

Either way, I finish creating a practiced impression of disorganisation and distraction. Papers shuffled, notebook to hand, IKEA website minimised on my desktop, though the student can’t see the screen from where she’s standing in the doorway. I pick up a pen. Better. I wave my hands, pen included.

“Yes, come in, make yourself comfortable, er, um…”

“Sophie. Sophie Love.”

Sophie scoots around on the seat, coming to rest sitting on her hands, knees drawn up.

“How can I help you, Sophie?”

“It’s silly really…” 

More than half the young women who sit in that chair preface their concerns with this. Hell, half my female colleagues and friends do the same when we talk together. Dammit, I say it and I’m fifty-fucking-five.

Never heard it from a man though. 

I’m behind my desk in the Big Professor Chair now - intimidating? Or reassuringly removed?I’m not sure, so I stand and depress the switch on the kettle I keep behind me. Academia runs on hot beverages as cars do fuel. 

“Silly’s okay, Sophie. If it helps, I’ll make tea and we can call it a break in my obviously teeming schedule.” I gesture to the door, from which the sound of chattering, clamouring students demanding my attention is noticeably absent. It’s too early in the term for that, even during office hours. “Come exam time, or coursework deadline time, we might be interrupted but I think we’re pretty safe today.”

The kettle boils. She takes the offer of tea. I keep the tray stocked with all kinds and she picks camomile. Could she be more of a hippy? No flower on her cheek I suppose. And I don’t think they make hippies anymore. I leave the tea bag in and hand her the mug and a spoon, gesturing at the bin. I make myself an instant decaf coffee. It’s muck, but if I drink filter all day Bad Things Happen. This way, coffee goes in and geology comes out. If it were filter, it wouldn’t be the only thing that did. Also I’m trying to cut back on the caffeine.

Sophie squeezes the teabag against the side of the mug with the spoon. The mug is red and reads “Lava Hurts!”; I hope that she doesn’t read it and think I’m taking the piss out of her surname. She gives no indication that she makes anything of it though and drops the teabag into the bin. I’m torn between relief and mild disapproval: geologists must be observant, particularly of terrible plays on words. She’s got other things on her mind though.

“It really is silly though, uh, Professor Powell.”

“Call me Sam, Sophie,” I say, “It’s shorter. Even saying Samantha takes up too much time when you’re my age.”

This is a joke, though to an undergrad anything over twenty five is probably ancient.

She takes a breath. Too late, I realise I’ve unconsciously adopted what my best friend Fiona, who’s a psychotherapist, calls “Therapist Face”. Slight left-leaning head tilt, creased brow, eyebrows up in the middle, one cheek tightened in a closed lip half smile. Goddammit, I’m even about to nod encouragingly. I lean back, trying not to look as if I’m awkwardly changing position. I hate being on the receiving end of Therapist Face and yet somehow still inflict it on others far too often. 

“The fence in our back garden broke last week,” says Sophie.

Now my eyebrows are responding for a new reason. I stop them, again. Training: good listeners don’t register judgement too quickly, or at all. Still, that wasn’t what I was expecting. Undergraduates often have trouble navigating the intricacies and administrative demands of adult life, but I don’t see where this is going.

“I think,” continues Sophie, “there’s a landslide happening and that we’re at the top of it.I’m worried about, um, I’m worried about the house.”

I wonder if she swerved at the last moment there. It sounded like she might have.

"Oh," I say, "but that sounds like something you could speak to your landlord about."

"Yes, and I would, but it’s the same house we had last year and I know his girlfriend left him over the summer and he’s always in a foul mood, so, um, so I don’t want to bother him until I’m sure."

"O… kay?"I sip my decaf.

"Well I was wondering if you’d come and have a look at it."She rocks on her hands, like a child.

"What," I ask, "does this have to do with how long you’ve lived in the house?" Let alone what it has to do with ME.

"I’d really rather you see for yourself, just in case I’m being silly.I know, I know this is weird and you’re a professor and you’re busy…" she trails off.I am, actually, busy despite the crack earlier about office hours. "I don’t know what to do and I’d rather you form your own opinion and I really want your advice on site, as it were."

She’s serious.Students can have bewildering and infuriating priorities and boundaries, or lack thereof.One once spent the first few minutes of a meeting _she had instigated_ to negotiate an _extension on an essay_ communicating by mime and notes on a portable whiteboard because she’d promised to spend the day in a sponsored silence.They tend to have to take time to develop a modicum of professionalism, except for the ones who’ve done significant amounts of paid work before arriving here. But Sophie seems sensible, if worried, and this is just peculiar.

"Sophie, if there’s a landslip at the back of your house you should call your landlord immediately.And also, you know this isn’t my speciality.If you want some free landslide advice we would have to go and ask the geotechnics department in the School of Engineering.Or Simon Doggerill-Doggett," - the swish bastard - "in Geography.He travels the world for this sort of thing. A small scale localised landslip sounds like the perfect thing for a student geomorphology field trip; he’d probably find it fun.He’d take the whole class to go and look at it and point at things excitedly."

The tosser. 

Sophie is persistent though, which confuses me.She seems like such a little flower child and yet she’s really pushing for me to come and look at this.Even though she said herself it was silly.At least twice.She’s a geology student, without easy access to the professors in Engineering or Geography, and at this point I’m legitimately curious.I look at her over my reading glasses, which I’ve forgotten to take off, and she looks back shifting slightly on the chair. 

"Please?"

I sigh.

"Fuck it, it’s nearly lunchtime anyway. Can you assure me we can look at this landslide from outside the property boundary? You’re a student and I don’t want to be accused of impropriety.Or following you home. Where do you live, anyway?"

"It’s only ten minutes walk.Winfield Close.It backs onto a little stream, we can walk around the back." I sigh again.I should stop that, like I should stop groaning every time I stand up.I stand up.And groan, of course. 

"Lead on, MacLove," I say, and she looks confused.I sign out at the front desk as we pass. "You see, it’s funny because your last name is Love but I made it sound like MacDuff, recalling the famous line from Shakespeare’s Macbeth and also the teen movie ‘Superbad’ in which Christopher Mintz-Plasse adopts the name McLovin to match his fake ID," I say, deadpan.

Sophie seems to consider this.

"I’ve never heard of that film, Professor.When did it come out?"

"Sam," I say, "And I don’t know, 2007 maybe?"

"Oh it’s an old movie," says Sophie, which apparently explains everything, and I give her a Look.My eyebrow is off its leash now and I allow it to arch accusingly. 

"I’d have been seven or eight when that came out," she explains, meekly.

"Fucking hell," I say. 

The walk to her house is, as current parlance has it, super awkward.

===

Sophie, it turns out, lives in a 1930s semi detached house that looks like every other 1930s semi detached house I’ve ever seen in my life.Red tiled, square bay windows, front garden separated from next door by a low wooden picket fence painted terracotta to match the tiles. Four bins, colour: various, line up in the front garden which is paved.Next door matches exactly.We approach from the front, since Sophie needs to change her wedges for something more appropriate for climbing around in the woods.I, at Sophie’s recommendation, had switched out my canvas flats (with glow in the dark planets on) for steel mid-sole ankle boots before we left the department.

Geologists do not fuck around when it comes to footwear. 

The house is in a cul-de-sac and we find a way around the back.I’m not too keen to be tramping on an active landslip, if that’s what it is, but I figure if it had fully failed Sophie wouldn’t need to ask me.Surely it would be obvious.“My fence is broken,” is what she’d said.So we clamber around the back of the row of houses, along the fence line, dodging scrubby elder trees, desultory student fly tipping and the ubiquitous shopping trolley. 

It stinks back here. Also, there’s a traffic cone. Because of course there is. 

We pick our way along. The ravine behind the houses is nothing special.You see this sort of thing in suburbs everywhere: a messy valley a few metres deep carrying a shallow stream flowing around discarded breeze blocks.At the far end of the valley the stream heads into a concrete culvert under the adjacent road.It’s predictably filthy and did I say it stinks? It stinks so hard my nose itches.

What am I doing here again? Right. Avoiding writing a research proposal. Standard.

"This one is mine," says Sophie. "That’s my inflatable alien in the window."

Sophie’s fence problems aren’t immediately apparent from our vantage point until we pull ourselves up to see over the back and into her garden.Sophie’s light enough to cling to the panels as we talk, but I don’t chance it although the fence at the end of the garden is still just about attached to the ground and to the adjacent panels.It might be tilting back a little.The parallel fences separating the adjacent gardens are distorted though and the end of the garden is visibly lower than the side near the house.There’s a distinct change in level, though I’d hesitate to call it a crack. It, whatever we call it, peters out to our left in the garden of the separate house next door.To the right is the other half of the house that includes Sophie’s semi, where the problem seems to continue.

"Next door is also owned by our landlord," explains Sophie, "but it’s empty right now. I, er, don’t know why.It was let last year to some really noisy boys.He, the landlord I mean, did some work on it over the summer.I assume he was working out his emotions from his girlfriend.Um.He didn’t fix our bathroom radiator though. It’s freezing in there still."

"Have you tried bleeding it?" I ask, automatically, and curse internally because she didn’t ask for my advice on radiators.And I always hated it when adults patronised me.Fuck, I did it again! Even in my head! They do all still look like children to me.

"Forget it," I say, before she can answer. "There’s obviously been some ground movement here.You’re not being silly about that. So what," I shift my feet to avoid a soft spot, "is this about?"

I shift again. It’s muddy back here.And it really, really smells.

Sophie looks sheepish.

"The - I don’t know the word,the bit that’s lower now, the crack - it goes into next door’s garden.And if you look, it goes a little into the land beyond the fence too.There’s no garden on that side because it’s the end house."

"Yes," I say, "and the word you’re grasping for is 'backscarp'."Probably.In my head, Simon Doggerill-Doggett takes an imaginary breath and raises one finger to correct me. Fuck him.

"So," continues Sophie, "we lived here in first year and it wasn’t like this."

"No shit," I say, "or you’d be elsewhere."

"Right," says Sophie, straining to see over the back fence. "But neither was THAT," and she points at next door’s garden.And the newly flagged patio.The newly flagged patio in the centre of the area that, from what I can tell and look this isn’t my kind of geology, not really, you want Simon for this, the newly flagged patio that is in the centre of the backscarp. 

I look at the patio, at the cheap concrete flags.I look at Sophie.I take a deep breath.Sophie looks like she’s been holding hers. 

"Sophie," I say, "Use your words. What, exactly, are you implying? What are you asking me?"

"Prof… Sam.You taught us Mohr’s circles last year."

God, yes I did.Dr Winnett was off for four weeks, infection and complications from having a testicle removed. We call him ‘One-Nut’ now, but only to his face. I hope the undergrads never find out.

Sophie’s pressing on. "You said that Mohr’s circles, uh, show that that rock strength is dependent on water pressure."

She’s balanced on the fence post foundation, a little concrete plinth, one hand hooked over the top of the back fence.I’m trying to stop my boots sinking further into the mud. It really is soft here.

"Sure," I say, "and it’s true for soil slopes as well. I showed you pictures of the Vaijont Dam, right?" Got them off Simon’s swanky blog.

She nods. "You said it was the world’s highest dam when it was built and that now it’s the world’s highest retaining wall."

I did say that.I like the symmetry of that line.The dam is still standing.When the mountainside collapsed into the reservoir, high in the Alps, the displaced water overtopped the dam and flooded two villages.Two thousand people died so I should probably be less flippant about it.

"Sophie, what’s your point?"

I want her to say it, although I have a horrible feeling I see where she’s going.Why did she drag me into this? Why am I supposed to know what to do?

I make her say it.So she does.

"The only thing that’s changed since the summer is the patio next door.Excavation could change the groundwater regime, yes?And the fact that the landlord’s girlfriend left him over the summer…" I take a deep breath. She continues. "What if she didn’t leave him? What if she’s still here but under that patio?"

And there it is.

"This is why you didn’t want to contact your landlord?"

She nods, shifting her grip on the fence post.I swear I’m at least up to my ankles in mud here, but Sophie is a little frantic.

"It’s not like I can call the police, because I don’t have proof of anything.Can I? Can I call the police just because I’m suspicious?"She’s got a point. I don’t know, actually.

"You think your landlord murdered his girlfriend and buried her in the back garden of one of his student houses."

"He’d have the keys," she argues, "and it’s basically abandoned over the summer here anyway. This is studentville." 

I look at the patio. The flags are uneven, possibly more so than is justifiable by six months of sitting there if there wasn’t a deeper hole been filled in underneath.I could convince myself it’s deeper in the middle now, as if it were sagging. 

Then Sophie screams and pinches my arm. 

I follow her gaze to the upstairs window next door, where an angry man is watching us watching him and peeking into his garden.

Shit. Busted.

His mouth opens and closes, he looks desperate and enraged but I can’t hear a sound until he opens the window and leans out. Then I hear a sound alright, but I don’t hear what the man is shouting because my left leg is swept from under me and I’m falling over and over, and soils and stones are flying all around me, water and mud and bones, fuck, really bones, and the worst god-awful smell I’ve ever smelt in my life, like someone vomiting directly into my nose and mouth, and I slam up against something sharp and a stinking, dripping, clinging weight settles against my chest and I look down into empty eye sockets and grinning teeth and I retch and retch and scream and retch and I hear Sophie, far away, screaming too and then everything recedes until all it is, is dark.

===

It was a horse!

A fucking horse!

Sophie Love’s fucking landlord used the back garden of a fucking student house to bury his fucking horse!

Turns out the idiot had ruptured a land drain when he’d dug a hole in the middle of the night to bury his FUCKING HORSE and the washout of the soil from the leaking drain caused the landslide. 

It wasn’t the girlfriend, so as far as I know my office still hasn’t an instance of bestiality to write home about thank god.He wasn’t a murderer.He’d genuinely owned the horse, which had died of natural causes in its stables, and it turns out that it’s technically not illegal to bury it in a residential back garden, though why you would is anyone’s guess.He claimed during the resulting insurance case (for which I had to testify in writing and which you bet your butt cheeks I followed assiduously, I could have died thank you very much) that he wanted the horse to have a last resting place overlooking ‘somewhere nice,’ as if a shitty little valley on some dead end street under a load of student houses qualifies.

Moron.

The insurance claim and repairs to the back gardens are still ongoing.I hope they drag on for years.

I was alright, more or less.I was very lucky that it was quite a shallow landslide. Even a cubic metre of soil weighs about two tonnes.Far less than that can kill you.Get hit with moving mud much above the mid-thigh and you’re dead for sure.I was buried up to the knees when they found me, propped up against a tree and delirious, clutching a decomposed horse skull, with a broken leg and a branch sticking in my side. 

Sophie was very apologetic.She had clung to her fence post, fortunately one that hadn’t moved, and stayed aloft although she was pretty shaken up.The smell alone would have done that.Do not, I repeat, do not ever dig up a dead horse.They had to relocate half the people in the street, even without the landslide, and one of the paramedics on the scene threw up.It was the landlord that called the ambulance and he stuck around while they treated us, so I guess there’s that to say in his favour. 

Simon-Bloody-Doggerill-Doggett, in person, delivered a bunch of sunflowers from the Geography Department and a copy of his Geomorphological Processes In Slope Stability text book - signed, the bellend - along with a smug offer to provide soil mechanics tuition if I felt the need to stand on top of any active landslips in future.I really hope someone doesn’t write in to Private Eye or something.The Geographers already have more funding and kudos than Geology and it’s not like we could have afforded to lose any more face.I may be in the dog house a little. Hah! Doggerill-Doggett house.My fellow geologists would probably be making a bigger deal about this if I hadn’t, well, almost died.They’re counting it as being in my lunch break, since I signed out, so not on work time, for insurance purposes.Even so, I’ve never had to fill in so many accident forms in my life. Thank God (who I still don’t believe in) that I have a life to spend filling them in though. 

Sophie asked me to forgive her, not that there was anything to forgive.In fact, she’ll get a pretty decent third year project out of this if she wants to.I’ve told her her title is “Why It’s A Really Bad Idea To Bury A Fucking Horse In Your Back Garden At The Top Of A Slope Over A Broken Drain You Fuckwit: A Case Study”.

Sarah the Pentecostal PhD student says I should forgive the landlord too, at least eventually.I’m not ready for that yet, but I think I already said I had sympathy for people who lose their pets.He’s an idiot, but don’t think in the long run I’ll find it too hard. 

A fucking horse!

Dipshit.

**Author's Note:**

> Content warnings are spoilers, so I've put them here at the end. There's graphic descriptions of a decaying animal body and mild peril. There is no murder. The animal died a natural death after a long, happy life and was buried respectfully if unwisely. One character breaks a bone but no-one dies. I hope overall it's a cheerful story!
> 
> If you liked it, let me know!


End file.
